Waterfronts

The spring turkey season is well underway, and if you haven't bagged a bird yet, be patient and persistent and things will eventually go your way.

That's how I managed to take a trophy gobbler after two long, frustrating days that reminded me why hunting wild turkeys is so challenging and so rewarding when you succeed.

The spring season in South Florida opened March 1 - it runs through April 6 - and the season in the rest of the state opened Saturday - it closes April 20. My friends Mike Capps and Kevin Howard, two avid Missouri turkey hunters who have hunted at Frasier Family Farms in Central Florida for the past six years, invited me to join them for opening weekend.

A 7,000-acre sand mining and cattle ranching operation a little north of Lakeland, the property was previously owned by Gen. James Van Fleet, who is widely regarded as one of the U.S. Army's finest generals. A multi-talented man, Van Fleet attended West Point, where he played fullback for Army's football team, and served in World Wars I and II and in the Korean War. He coached the University of Florida football team in the early 1920s and raised cattle on his ranch. He also hunted turkeys on the ranch, often with his West Point classmate President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Donnie Frasier bought the ranch several years after Van Fleet died in 1992 at the age of 100. He still maintains Van Fleet's house and spacious guesthouse, where people stay during the opening week turkey hunt, which is the only time the ranch is hunted.

Tough turkeys

Given the lack of hunting pressure and the ranch's abundance of wild turkeys, you'd think getting a gobbler would be easy. But the birds responded to the sudden arrival of strange vehicles and camouflage-clad hunters walking through the woods by doing the opposite of what they'd been doing.

Opening morning, Capps and I set up near a food plot where Wayne Shelby, who keeps tabs on the ranch's turkeys, said a large gobbler liked to hang out. We didn't hear any gobbling and we saw only a couple of hen turkeys and a handful of white-tailed deer. It wasn't until later in the morning that we saw the gobbler half a mile from us and headed farther away.

That afternoon, I went out with Howard, Tack Robinson and Chuck Smock to an area Van Fleet had named Gobbler Ridge. Shelby said the woods there had an old, lonely gobbler who would probably come in to our calls, and Howard had heard quite a few gobbles there in the morning.

We heard a gobble right away, but the bird never came in and we never heard another gobble. We began walking along a trail, stopping to call every now and then, and were rounding a bend when Robinson had us slam on the breaks.

"A big longbeard," said Robinson, using the term for a mature gobbler. "We spooked him."

That was our closest encounter, but the afternoon was not without excitement. The four of us sat down by a tree and Howard called sporadically. After a while, Smock alerted us to a bobcat that was coming in to Howard's hen yelps. The cat came within 15 feet of us and sat down before it realized the four wide-eyed creatures staring at it were not turkeys and it ran away.

Bad timing

Howard, Smock and I were back at Gobbler Ridge the next morning and we heard at least three different gobblers sound off. One of them stepped out of the woods 300 yards away from us and we watched him put on a show for the three hens that joined him as he strutted and gobbled.

Things were looking up when the hens left the gobbler and he slowly but steadily headed our way, stopping only to gobble at Howard's yelps, clucks and purrs. My heart was thumping when the bird was 100 yards away. Then a dozen cows appeared to our left.

The cows looked at us huddled at the edge of the woods, hesitated, and continued walking. One of them mooed and the turkey gobbled in response. We held our breaths when another group walked by, but the gobbler was still headed toward us. Then a bunch of cows ran to catch up with the rest of the herd and the gobbler turned around and backed up 20 yards.

He didn't appear to be spooked, and he still gobbled, so we were hoping Howard could call him the rest of the way. Then the three hens appeared, the gobbler headed straight for them and they spent the rest of the morning in the middle of the pasture, giving us no chance to get within shotgun range.

Sunday afternoon, I went out with Capps and Curtis Clark, a local cattleman who helps Shelby with the hunts on some of the 6,000 acres that he and his family own.

Clark knew where two gobblers liked to go before roosting for the evening, and we headed out to put up a portable blind along the path that they take along the edge of a pasture. We hadn't gotten very far when Clark saw the gobblers already at the edge of the pasture, two hours ahead of schedule.